Red Post Collection: Update on Short vs Long lore entries, Shurima community creations roundup, and more!

This morning's red post collection features Jaredan explaining the current situation with the short client entries and the promised longer versions for Shurima champion lore, info on a recent hotfix to address Mac bugs, Shurima community creations roundup, and more!

Now that the event is over and these longer stories are no where to be found, lore enthusiasts are starting to lose faith and have taken to the forums to voice their frustrations.

Jaredan jumped in to the thread to explain the current situation and problems they have encountered with the long form bios, including rewriting the Azir and Xerath entries :

"Hi Terra and all,

First up, I just want to talk about the thinking behind the use of shorter character intros in the client, for those who may not have seen previous conversations.

The current in-client champion page is not ideal for longer stories. One of its core purposes is quickly introducing players to a champion, and we've run into format and character limits that further constrain our ability to tell rich stories. Our plan for this space is to have a short, thematic introduction to the character, for players who want to quickly understand who and what they are, and then a longer story on the website that can be fully dedicated to being entertaining and showing the champions within our story world. Long-term, this will allow us to actually explore more story for each champion than was previously possible. We don't want to take story away, we want to do more.

That said, I get that this means nothing to you until we've actually delivered it. To be perfectly honest, we've run into a couple issues that have temporarily set us back. Firstly, the champion info pages on the web and in-client both pull from the same database, and the tech change required to implement the plan I described above is taking a bit longer than expected.

More importantly, when we knew we couldn't put the stories out to you in the way we wanted - and after listening to some of the concerns you expressed during the Shurima event - we took a long hard look at the prepared stories we had and, frankly, decided we could do better. Azir and Xerath's stories are being rewritten and we are already pursuing other opportunities with Shurima-related champions.

Essentially, we're currently out of sync on a couple of fronts: 1) having the content ready for you, and 2) the tech issue we're working hard to solve.

Right now you might be thinking to yourself, "Surely, you should have had this all ready to go in advance?"

The only answer I can give is this: you're absolutely right.

We've made mistakes and seen the unease it has caused, particularly at a time when so much change has happened in recent months and in light of the promises we've made.
As I've said recently on these boards, we care tremendously about you, the players, as well as the story of Runeterra. I also know promises that we're working to get you much more story are meaningless until you see results.

As I mentioned, we're currently hard at work on some Shurima-related stories (not to mention future content), and we want to get the first of them out to you just as soon as we can properly finalize them. If we cannot solve the tech issue within the necessary timeframe, we will get the stories to you in analternative way, perhaps even through this board.

We're making a lot of changes to improve how Narrative gets story to you and how we engage in a dialogue about it - we fully understand that we need to do better."

I know that our communication has not been great. That's putting it mildly. It's actually what we are attempting to fix and why we are communicating our narrative strategy. It opens up that dialogue.

By we, I mean Narrative and Riot. We all tackle things like this together. No team is an island. We discuss this a lot and our lore impacts many teams at Riot so we like to be in sync.

In terms of an answer to your original question, I think I can coax one out of the narrative team. I think you are right about wading in to controversial threads. We shouldn't shy from that.

In terms of our narrative lead, I feel some topics should remain private. But I will say, it's not about backlash at all. I think the strategy outlined is a good one. The right one. And that is what we plan to do. Also, that lead never strayed from a challenge! He has my deepest respect. But some topics are personal and should stay that way.

We need to be able to tell great stories about our champions in a really robust way. Some folks will disagree with how we approach it. That's okay. We get it. At the same time, we're excited by the possibilities. This is a journey, and we're committed to it.

We also understand that nothing we say right now will really matter. No words will make it better. The only thing that matters now is better stories. Better content. I know "soon" is frustrating. But I think in this case, time is the only thing that will prove our commitment.

As far as being burned, I get it. We deserve your skepticism but hope to do you proud my friend."

"We're working on both nations and champions. As we develop the world, it's through the lens of creating the best opportunities for stories, which necessarily includes our champions because our storytelling should be character-focused. When we think about the world, it usually leads to questions about how conflict is created for our champions within those settings.

As we tell the tales of new places, we should also be ensuring that characters are the central driving force to those narratives. In the case of the Shurima event, we need to spend more time on the characters involved (and the other Shuriman champions who were not) in order to develop that focus beyond what we have delivered so far. We learned a lot from that event, including from the feedback given here and elsewhere.

Though events give a prime opportunity to explore characters, we want to also just create stories and content when we have ideas to do them. We will definitely be providing content for each of our new champions, for the larger reworks on champions (such as Sion) and more.

We're working tlowards the things you mention in regard to timeline, but we want to be able to deliver those happenings in the form of compelling stories. That's not to say we'll never have an explicit timeline summary, just that we want to deliver an enthralling world to keep track of along the way. We don't just want to say that the Noxian invasion of Ionia happened (and it did, BTW), we want to tell stories of its aftermath, how Ionia responds to this threat to its physical and spiritual identity and so on."

He continued, responding to a player who feels that things have only been removed and nothing added to fill the space :

"We're working on them.

And you're right, without content, the changes to Runeterra as a story world are without the necessary context to ease concerns, or even give tangible points around which to discuss things more deeply. Stories of conflict, love, loss and Poro-Snax will replace the Institute. We are working on delivering them. Except maybe the Poro-Snax. Maybe."

"We've got a lot of thoughts on how we want to develop the story experience in the future. There's no timeline that I can point towards in the short term for something that is as holistic as we want it to be, however. The changes I mentioned previously are for the short term, but they'll help us in many ways. Including being a click away, but not all within the client.

We want various levels of story to be available in a way that is easy, intuitive and engaging. And when I say "we" I'm talking about Riot rather than just Narrative. I've talked with people in various disciplines recently about this as we figure out a good way forward. There are some limitations, but we're working on them."

"Yeah, Sion's longer story had us running around a bit for the very reason you mentioned. There was an error that switched it in instead of his shorter character intro. Once it was in, we had the option of pulling it out and replacing it with the intro, but due to the issues I've mentioned, we didn't have anywhere we could put it that we were happy with, particularly as we expect a fix to be arriving pretty soon.

Once the tech fix is in place, we'll put the short intro into the client and the longer story onto the web."

When asked about the fate of the in-game lore pages now that the short lore entries leave a lot of extra room, Jaredan noted:

"We're working on making the client page you referenced look better, but the client-to-web issue and a link to the website content is the priority right now. We'll make sure that you won't have to wait months; we'll get the stories out soon, one way or another."

4.17 Hotfix deployed for mac crashes

A small hotfix aimed at fixing up mac issues was pushed to the client recently!

Sculpting with ZBrush

This is Zbrush. A lot of our 3D artists use it to make very high resolution models (in the millions of polygons). Then we take that high rez model and do a process called retopologizing, usually in 3D-Coat, TopoGun or Maya. This process turns the model into a game asset which is in the thousands of polygons.

I actually cannot speak highly enough of Zbrush. Grumpy Monkey is the guy who showed me around Zbrush and helped me learn all the ins and outs. It's currently a big part of my pipeline, even as a 2D artist. It pretty much allows you to concept in 3D like you would play with clay. It's mind-blowing.

If you're just getting into 3D sculpting, try Sculptris, with is actually made by Pixelogic now, the makers of Zbrush.. which I just found out like.. a minute ago when I googled it. TIL.

That's a great place to just start out and play. Zbrush proper is a very robust program which even professionals often just use a fraction of depending on specialty. Sculptris will be even more streamlined for the newcomer, and if you ever get really into it, you can always move onto Zbrush when your aptitude increases.

Also! Check out more of Grumpy Monkey's work! DISCLAIMER! The Singed you see on there is NOT an official VU. That was a demo Josh did for a conference.

Shurima Community Creations Roundup

Speaking of Shurima, Riot Jynx is back with a round up of some sand-tastic Shurima community creations!

"After one thousand years, Azir returns to raise the lost empire of Shurima from the sands. As a tribute to the exalted emperor, we’re showcasing a handful of glorious Shurima-themed community artwork, cosplay, and crafts!

Still refining your Shurima creations? Post a link in the comments when your masterpiece awakens! Next week, we’ll feature some of the most magnificent Shurima creations on theSummoner Showcase Tumblr."